Nomination Reform

Introduction

Nominating candidates for president is one of the most important features of U.S. governance. With the exception of campaign finance law, which is largely a dead letter, no national law governs the presidential nomination process. Rather, most of the important details of the presidential nomination process are set by national party rules and state laws. In the absence of an incumbent president or vice president seeking a presidential nomination in either party, the 200 nomination contests tested that process. This paper is about what happened in 2008 and what should happen to improve the process in the future. Going into the 2008 primary and caucus season, we thought that 2008 would be consequential on many dimensions.

Discussion

Front-loading had been an issue for years, but states moved to even earlier positions on the electoral calendar—unprecedentedly. the first events were held in early January. An open contest in both parties meant that more money than ever would he raised and spent on the nomination phase of electing a president. And, Senators Hillary Clinton and Barrack Obama, the first female and African American candidates who had a good chance of winning a major party's nomination, were seeking the Democratic nomination, promising an interesting contest of factional and identity politics. (Norrander 49-56)

But we never imagined that events would unfold as they did. With so many prominent Republicans contesting the early primaries, some observers thought the Republican nomination contest could stretch into the spring, hut Senator John McCain, with the help of winner-take-all rules for delegate selection in many states, solidified his grip on the nomination in the first five weeks of primaries and caucuses. The Democrats, who had just two candid ates with competitive levels of support at the start of the nomination season, appeared likely to settle their contest on Super Tuesday, February 5, just a month into the process; but, as it turned out, they did not settle their contest until June—six months after the Iowa caucuses, when Clinton retired from the campaign and Obama became the presumptive winner. (Bode, 12-15)

Choosing presidential candidates is the most bewildering process in the U.S. electoral system, if we dare call it a system. Only since the early 1970s, nearly two centuries into the history of the republic, have the two major parties employed rules governing the state delegate selection processes in much detail—and the two parties adopted quite different rules. Since the early I 970s, many, hut not all, state legislatures have stepped in to establish by state law the timing of primaries and caucuses, eligibility to vote in primaries, the placement of candidates' names on ballots, and the process by which delegates are named by candidates. No two states have identical processes. No federal law governs the process of selecting delegates to the parties' national conventions, at which the presidential candidates are officially nominated.

In all of the recent presidential election cycles, the nomination process has generated controversy. Almost without exception, the controversy has been in the Democratic Party, which took ...